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"There's nothing whatsoever we can do about it" makes it sound like a 600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable. Or that carbon sequestration at less than 1000X natural processes is equivalent to none at all. Your own links dispute that.

Not sure how you morphed what I said into what you are saying. I did not say that a "600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable" anywhere.

We cannot stop it" much less reduce it. The amount of energy and resources this would require is far more likely to kill everything on this planet than fix anything.

You have to think in terms of planetary scale. California is a rounding error. Switching every car in CA to electrics is a rounding error. Switching everyone to solar and wind power is a rounding error.

The comparison is to every human being not being on this planet* and our technology shutting down. And in that we know we are looking at tens of thousands of years for a 100 ppm drop.

Look, I don't like this reality any more than anyone else. I just want us to stop lying so we can look at this issue from a far more honest perspective. We cannot fix this. We cannot create an artificial solution for a planetary scale problem that would take longer to solve without us around than humanity might survive.

Look at the massive forest fires we've had just this year in CA. Care to guess how much CO2 these fires released? I've done the numbers for other fires in the past. It's hard to estimate but I think it is very safe to say that these annual fires easily release YEARS of equivalent transportation CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

In fact, that's how the planetary system works!

If you go back to the 800,000 years of CO2 data there are two obvious questions anyone inquisitive enough should be asking:

How did CO2 increase without humanity around? Massive continental scale fires across somewhere in the order of 25,000 years.

How did CO2 decrease without humanity around? Weather. Rains. Hurricanes. Cyclones. Water precipitating CO2. And, yes, trees and plants growing back after the massive fires.

Destruction is always easier and faster than reconstruction. These are basic principles. If you curve fit the charts you'll come up with about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase due to massive fires and 50,000 to 100,000 years for a drop of the same amount due to weather.

Another question that comes up is: Well, we were able to increase it by 100 ppm in a few hundred years. How does that make any sense?

Good question. Easy answer.

We did it by burning through billions of years in accumulated energy in the form of petroleum". When we burn one gallon of gasoline in a car or one ton of bunker fuel in a cargo ship we are burning something that took an exceedingly long period of time to "manufacture". It took energy in the form of solar energy and an unimaginably large amount of raw materials (plants and animals) to produce the black goo we pull out of the ground and burn. So, yes, in a few hundred years we were able to burn energy that took millions of years and, again, unimaginable amounts of biomass, to produce.

And that's another reason for which fixing the problem is impossible. I challenge anyone to name one problem that can be solved with less* energy than that which produced it. If we start with the premise that nothing can be 100% efficient and add to that the sheer scale of the energy and mass that went into what caused this problem the answer, which is right there in the graphs, is beyond obvious. It's high school physics.

We need to stop lying if we want a chance to understand the future and make it a better one.

> Not sure how you morphed what I said into what you are saying. I did not say that a "600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable" anywhere.

It's a direct consequence of "There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it."

We're at 400ppm right now. For there to be "nothing we can do", there would have to be no appreciable difference between keeping our current trajectory (1000+) versus slowing emissions down to 600, or 500, or 400.

If what you're actually saying is that "nothing we can do will bring us down to 300ppm", then that might be true, but that's a statement about a hundred times weaker than what you actually said. Being stuck at 400 would not be a tragedy. 400ppm is not what people are extremely worried about.

Please argue against the data. What I say does not matter.

Go through the very simple exercise I describe in my original comment.

Pull-up the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 chart.

Determine the natural "no humans on earth" rate of change for the reduction of atmospheric CO2.

Then explain how anything we do --anything-- can deliver a 1000x improvement on this rate of change.

Even a 100x improvement on this rate of change would mean, at best, 500 years and at worst about 1,000 years.

This isn't very complicated but people seem intent in ignoring it.

I have yet to find someone, anyone, from lay persons to PhD's who, when forced to argue against the data we have don't go "Oh shit. You are right".

The problem is people read the words and never really take the time to engage in a simple high school geometry exercise that, from my perspective, represents a mind-bending revelation for most folks. It was for me. I set out to understand the subject and ran into this irrefutable wall. I am still looking for someone who, having honestly looked at the data, is able to honestly explain why the conclusion is wrong.

Can you?

Have you looked at the data?

Ignore me. I'm just some fool typing words. The data is what matters here. My words don't. Argue against the data. That's how you prove me wrong. I don't think anyone can. And that's a pretty serious statement.

The problem with the down-votes on something like HN is that they are a cheap, low-effort and no consequence to muzzle opinions in the laziest of ways. It eliminates any degree of engagement and does not promote dialogue or learning. Having just watched "The Social Dilemma" this seems par for the course. Radicalization by "cancel culture" rather than dialogue.

At least you are engaging with me.

Now I am asking you to stop focusing on my words and please take some time to go look at the data, just the data, nothing more, nothing less. And then answer the question yourself and refute my conclusion if you can.

BTW, I am DESPERATE for someone to actually tell me how my conclusion is wrong. I don't like this conclusion. I would very much prefer to be wrong and learn how.

Again, can you?

Great comment chain. The one thing sticking out to me though is what appears to be an assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline.

If we are talking hypotheticals here, if humankind managed to shift all energy production to renewables and effectively reduce their carbon footprint to zero (this is pretty much an impossibility with current technology and culture), all carbon capture schemes would in fact be increasing the rate at which co2 was sequestered (faster than just natural processess alone).

We are talking about technologies like bio-engineered trees that grow incredibly fast and are then harvested and stored safely. And there will likely be a myriad of technologies we can not even fathom right now to directly pull out and sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Are any of these things likely to happen in the next 20, 50 100 years? Maybe, maybe not.

You did mention that scientists should be freed up to work on aiding humans in adapting to this inevitable future, and these kinds of technologies would likely be researched in parallel to that effort, in order to bring the Earth back into a more hospitable condition for us.

I very much doubt it will take thousands of years to reverse the course we find outselves on, once there is enough political capital available to actually make change.

> assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline.

No, sorry. That's not what I meant. What the ice core data gives us as a baseline is what will happen if humanity and all of our technology leaves the planet. Let's call it 100K years for 100 ppm reduction.

This is a real baseline based on highly accurate scientific data. The first thing I did when I reached this conclusion was to try to invalidate ice core sample data. It turns out this data is extremely accurate and, I think I can say, irrefutable.

And so, this is the baseline from which, I propose, we need to evaluate any proposal that says: Eliminate X and we save the planet (fix the problem, stop climate change, etc., pick one).

In other words, I propose it proves a simple idea:

We cannot fix this problem by eliminating anything.

We can say this because we know that if eliminate humans and human technology --let's call that "everything"-- it will take 100K years to drop 100 ppm.

Every such proposal should be measured from this baseline.

Eliminate cars? Nope, you can't just do that and fix it faster than 100K/100ppm, if at all.

Eliminate cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships? Nope, that is still less than humanity evaporating. It's still, at best >100K/100ppm.

Eliminate all fossil fuels and all of the above? OK, now we are getting stilly and it still isn't going to be any less than 100K/100ppm. Because for 100K/100ppm by elimination of human sources of CO2 we have to leave the planet.

If you haven't I urge you to read the paper I linked to in my top comment. The researchers had enough and were convinced that the solution was a world-wide shift to renewables. They say so in the paper. And --thankfully-- they are also honest enough to say that they were astounded to discover that what they knew to be true was, in fact, false. We need honest scientists that are isolated from the consequences of looking at the truth of these issues.

Their conclusion, paraphrasing, was something like: Even if we switched the entire world to the most optimal and efficient forms of renewable energy (yet to be invented) atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially.

That is a sobering though.

As to solutions like bioengineered trees, etc. From what I've seen the main issue (other than the potential for horrific unintended consequences) seems to be that when you look at the energy and resources it would require to develop, manufacture, deploy and manage such technologies you realize they would cause more harm than good.

I don't know the answers. What I think I know is that we need to stop lying because the narratives being pushed are false and dangerous (because they prevent our scientists from working on the real problem).

You need to remove 30 gigatons per year to eliminate all the CO2 humans generate. This is the "what if humans disappeared" baseline you mentioned.

If we eliminated 30 gigatons annually, yes the earth would recover at the rate you describe.

If we increase above 30 gigatons or reduce emissions, we shorten the time dramatically.

Growing trees or grasses, pyrolizing them into syngas and biochar, and sequestering the char could, in theory, supplement natural processes.

It's a process that can be run with an energy surplus, but it does require a lot of labor and land.

You'd need hundreds of thousands of square miles wholly dedicated to the effort.

DACCS facilities are expensive, but achievable. You'd need roughly three major industrial DACCS facilities for every coal fire plant worldwide, which would be incredibly challenging but not impossible.

I think where some of these ideas run afoul of reality is that they ignore the scale of energy and resources necessary to make them happen. And the probability distribution of each idea being realizable at scale.

It's a planetary scale problem, which means the numbers are very large no matter what anyone suggests.

I have no clue how much CO2 t-shirt manufacturing produces when you consider the entire supply chain and human footprint. If you add-up t-shirt manufacturing world wide, the number likely isn't trivial. And yet, even if we stop making t-shirts the need for clothing does not evaporate. I would be willing to bet that t-shirt manufacturing is now optimized almost as far as one could go and the providing an alternative form of clothing to billions of people around the world would be dirtier and consume more resources than just making t-shirts.

This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real.

I can't think of a single problem --regardless of the domain-- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place.

And so, if that's true --and I think it is true without dispute-- this idea of being able to control atmospheric CO2 concentration at a planetary scale is in a range between hubris and lunacy.

Another way to put it is: We cannot fix it by subtraction.

This means we cannot fix it by simply going down to zero CO2 generation, no matter what the approach might entail. That, at best, gets us to 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in CO2.

I admit, this is a defeatist view. Yet, I believe this is reality and what is being pushed out there is fantasy. My fear is that, yes, we need to start doing a number of things to make human life better (the planet will do fine without us) but none of this work will begin until we frame it from a truthful baseline.

As I have said before, there are tons of reasons to cleanup our act globally --and we should-- but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that this is to save the planet or reverse climate change. We can't. We won't.

And we won't because, even if we go to zero CO2 the planet itself will not cooperate. If you look at the charts for the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 data one of the questions should be: How did CO2 increase, we were not around to make it happen?

The answer is, for the most part, massive continental scale fires.

So, we go CO2 neutral and cover the planet with trees.

And then fires, massive fires, fires we cannot control, contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than we ever contributed before with our non-carbon-neutral technologies. Just look at what happened this year in California alone:

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-cal...

It is hubris to think we can control this at a planetary scale. We can't control it in a US state that recently surpassed the entire United Kingdom to become something like the fifth largest economy in the world...and we can't stop massive forest fires. From the article:

"The fires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% more than the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels."

I wish I had answers. All I am able to do is point out that we are lying to ourselves in hopes that, if enough people stop to think and understand this reality we will switch tracks and empower our scientific community to look at this from a different perspective. Maybe then someone with a unique perspective might discover a way to deal with it. We don't need to fix it, I don't believe we can, we need to understand how humanity can survive the cycle we are on.

Thanks for engaging.

no, thank you for explaining it so well.

This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real.

I can't think of a single problem -- regardless of the domain -- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place.

Accelerated silicate weathering is one approach that takes less energy than turning carbon dioxide back into carbon and oxygen [1]. Natural silicate weathering has a low thermodynamic cost but is kinetically hindered. Accelerated silicate weathering only spends energy to accelerate the kinetics of natural silicate weathering and needs much less energy than combustion-in-reverse.

Iron ocean fertilization is also possibly another case where the required human energy input for drawdown could be much smaller than reversing combustion. I say "possibly" because it has not been tested with enough rigor and scale yet.

You can see from my comment history that I agree with you about how slowly natural processes alone can bring atmospheric CO2 levels back down to pre-industrial levels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24297363

[1] e.g. Project Vesta https://projectvesta.org/

> Accelerated silicate weathering > Iron ocean fertilization

The real question is what it will cost in terms of energy and CO2 to mine, produce, prepare, deploy and manage such processes.

I have a very hard time accepting that we can use less energy to reverse something than the energy it took to create it. I have to admit it would take a lot of research on my part to fully break down these processes and quantify them from start to finish. I am just going to trust physics and say that I suspect perpetual motion machines are still impossible.

What truly scares me about ideas like iron ocean fertilization is the massive potential for causing a disaster that could damage sea life and ecosystems for hundreds of years. It's one thing to run an experiment on one beach or two. It's quite another to do this at a scale sufficient enough to affect things at planetary scale.

That's where, frankly, my brain short circuits a bit. I can't imagine some of these things done at a planetary scale without expending massive amounts of resources and producing equally massive amounts of pollution, CO2 and potential ecosystem damage.

Now, here's a twist. If the thought is that we can deploy any one of X approaches and deliver results a thousand times faster than the natural rate of change (100KY/100ppm) we have to be truly scared about what the unintended consequences might be. It's almost like that story about when they detonated the first nuclear weapon and thought there was some probability of the entire atmosphere igniting. I am not sure if the story is true, but it illustrates the point well enough.

I think we (and anyone who truly stops to look at the data and apply critical thinking) agree that this is a difficult problem that is being made far more complex by a narrative that is patently false (or distorted) all both extremes. This is a sad reality. Science should not work this way. Scientists should be free from political forces.

Accelerated silicate weathering is not a perpetual motion machine. Do you understand the difference between thermodynamics and kinetics, in the context of chemical reactions? (Not trying to condescend, just calibrating how much background to include in my next explanation.)

There is a big difference between "this approach is impossible according to physics" and "this approach might work but I'm worried about the side effects." It seems like for iron ocean fertilization you're asserting something more like the second statement than the first.

I'm interested in active atmospheric CO2 removal approaches because emissions cuts alone aren't enough to get back below 400 ppm CO2 on human time scales, as you have noted. Shying away from mitigation approaches because they could have unknown side effects at large scale is just committing to suffering the unmitigated brunt of AGW. Anything effective will have to be large scale.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I was making a general comment about "solutions" being offered while completely ignoring the entire resource, energy and CO2 generation chain required to actually deploy the solution. A silly example of this is using huge "air filters" in every city...which some have actually proposed.

I need to go learn more about silicate weathering, don't know enough.

> thermodynamics and kinetics, in the context of chemical reactions

I regret not having paid more attention in university during chemistry class. Paid lots of attention during multiple years of physics (it was more interesting to me at the time).

Wait a minute...isn't chemistry just applied physics? :)

In general terms, I think we need to take this perspective on the problem:

1- We can't fix it on a human time scale (let's define that as a number between 100 and 1000 years)

2- We need to free-up our scientists (and fund them) to start thinking about and working on this implications and the solutions we will actually need

3- We need to start working on having to live with the reality of more intense weather events

4- We need to start working on mitigating effects for food supplies and other essentials

5- We need to be super careful about the potential for unintended consequences. I always think about what happened in places like Australia, New Zealand and others when we dared to think we could exercise control:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/health/17iht-17isla.20237...

When compared with trying to produce a planetary scale effect, these ecosystems are but a rounding error. This is what worries me the most. We can't "fix" something on an island and we have the hubris to think we can actually "fix" the planet and not kill everyone on it as part of the process.

This, BTW, is why I tend to be a proponent of learning to live with it while cleaning-up our act to the extent possible without being so arrogant as to think we can do anything about it on a human time scale.

5- We violently remove politics from this. I do not mean this in terms of physical violence, I am using the term to mean "faster than fast". In other words: Go sit in the corner while the intelligent adults in the room have a conversation.

This isn't a simple problem and we need to be exceedingly careful not to be led by the nose by political and other forces into something that could destroy more life on this planet than we can possibly imagine.

The weathering of alkaline silicates naturally draws down atmospheric CO2. It's a slow acid-base neutralization reaction. CO2 dissolved in water forms carbonic acid, which reacts with alkaline rocks. Calcium silicate plus carbon dioxide turns into calcium carbonate plus silicon dioxide. The reaction is spontaneous under ambient conditions on the Earth's surface, meaning that it is thermodynamically favorable. It doesn't require any added energy beyond that naturally present in the environment. The reverse reaction that separates carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate again is thermodynamically disfavored. It requires a large energy input, as in the making of quicklime from limestone for cement production.

The geological carbon cycle based on silicate weathering is what will naturally neutralize human CO2 emissions on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years.

The reason it takes hundreds of thousands of years is that the chemical kinetics -- rate -- of the natural reaction are very slow, being limited by the available reactant surface area. This is the same reason that e.g. a steel hammer left outside in a rainy region takes years to completely disintegrate to rust, while steel wool under the same conditions will disintegrate to rust in under a year. The thermodynamics are the same in both situations: iron oxidizes spontaneously. But the kinetics are much faster when the material has a large surface area exposed.

Most of the exposed weatherable silicates on Earth are in the form of huge chunks: boulders, mountains, and region-spanning plateaus. The idea behind accelerated silicate weathering is to crush huge chunks of silicates down to sand-size particles so that the surface area and reaction rate increase dramatically. If the crushed material is dumped into shallow ocean water near shores, wave action also provides additional "free" mechanical grinding to further accelerate the process. Using these silicates to neutralize excess soil acidity on agricultural land, where limestone would normally be used, is another way to further accelerate the chemical transformation.

The human energy input required for accelerated silicate weathering is still large in absolute terms, but much smaller than trying to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. It might take 5% of a coal plant's electricity output to crush enough silicates to offset its CO2 emissions. (Though ideally you would run the process on renewables, since crushing can be scheduled flexibly and only annual throughput really matters.) The process reverses ocean acidification effects of CO2 as well as reversing warming effects from CO2 in the atmosphere. It doesn't require artificially concentrating CO2 out of the atmosphere.

I believe that accelerated silicate weathering can bring atmospheric CO2 back below 300 ppm in less than 1000 years, though still more than 100 years. That's assuming that anthropogenic emission rates decline over time, mind you.

It makes sense that the vast majority of the discussion around AGW mitigation is still about cutting emissions. While emissions are still growing, even ambitious plans like large scale accelerated silicate weathering can't offset them. Still, if you look at the IPCC reports and other scholarly literature, scientists are looking ahead beyond emissions cuts. The term they use is "negative emissions."

This is valuable insight to add to my knowledgebase.

One way I am thinking about what you are saying is the concept that a block of ice melts at a much lower rate than the same mass of ice in small cubes. The principle being that a greater exposed surface area produces a higher rate of heat transfer from warm air to ice, accelerating melting.

I am trying hard to frame this issue in the simplest possible terms so that it is easy to consume the information by those who might not have the scientific background. I don't think the effort to shift the conversation will succeed if it is framed by equations impenetrable by the average person.

What you highlight --that the limit rate of CO2 "consumption" is a function of available reactant surface area-- is a valuable tool with which to communicate the idea that this process is beyond human time scale. In other words, the natural rate of change is what it is due to physical realities of this planet. It cannot be a thousand times faster just by installing solar panels or banning IC vehicles. I can see a YouTube video using the simple example of ice melting as a way to explain this.

I'll do a bit more reading and shamefully steal some of your insight. Like I said, I regret not having paid more attention during Chemistry class in college. The good news is, it's never too late to learn.

Thanks.

I'm happy that you found this valuable.

The simplest analogy I might try to use is that table sugar crystals stirred into water dissolve in seconds while a piece of hard candy will take minutes to dissolve.

You're talking about undoing already released CO2.

The people discussing mitigation are talking about decreasing the release rate of new CO2, so the peak value or the value a hundred years from now can be smaller.

Your math is right but you're solving the wrong equation.

If humans all disappeared right now and CO2 stayed at 400ppm approximately forever, you're treating that as the "failure" case. Everyone else is treating 400ppm as a mild success, and their "failure" cases are far far higher levels like 1000ppm.

If your goal is a binary "not get punched in the face" then it's too late after you get hit a couple times. But it still makes a big difference whether they stop after a few punches, or keep going until you're in the hospital!

Yes. This is why I think we should be doing much more geoengineering research than we are now.

I realize that geoengineering poses its own dangers. I just don't think we're going to have any choice.

> There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it. Plain and simple.

[citation needed]

Humans could never fly. We could never destroy entire mountains. We could never drain an entire sea or make an island. We could never split an atom. We could never walk on the moon. We could never have an international network sending live video around the world at near light speed. We could never burn so much fuel that we heat up the earth in a measurable degree.

Yet people did all of these things.

Just because it seems impossible now doesn't mean it won't be possible someday.

> I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm

If a single person right here, right now, could do that in an economical fashion, they'd be a trillionaire before the decade is over. Nobody in 2001 was single handedly making pocket-sized GPSes that played games, streamed video, and had AI facial recognition in the sub-thousand dollar price range either, but that changed fast. Anybody who proposed using solar panels and windmills as a main power source for cities in 1910 would've been called a kook just as well. It's incremental change.

> [citation needed]

Go back and read my top post and go through the exercise I delineated. I provided everything you need to verify the claim. It is so simple a high school kid with a ruler could do it.

That's what's so frustrating about this. People like to say things like "well, just because cows don't fly today". Well, no, that's not a counter-argument. This is about physics. What's interesting is that it is about physics so simple the answer can be discovered with a printed chart, a ruler and a pencil.

If you bother to go through the exercise, the baseline you should discover is that, in rough terms, it takes 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2. 100KY/100ppm.

What does that mean?

That's the baseline for any subtractive approach to "saving the planet".

It's the baseline that says: We know it's 100KY/100ppm if we eliminate EVERYTHING.

It's simple logic to understand that if we engage in partial elimination the rate of change will not be better than 100KY/100ppm. It cannot.

If you erase the entire United States from the face of the planet, will the rate be better than 100KY/100ppm. No way. Impossible. And we just erased the largest economy on the planet.

Meanwhile, the governor of California is virtue-signaling by trying to eliminate IC cars in 15 years? How is that going to even make a dent?

He is far more likely to trigger an industrial shift that will result in far more CO2 being produced to retool and shift to manufacturing and support electric vehicles than IC vehicles ever produced.

Simple logic: Do anyone have any idea how many high power charging stations a fully electric-car CA would require?

Well, there are over 10,000 gas stations in CA. I am going to say we likely need at least twice that many high power charging stations. Why? Because you can fill your gas tank in 5~10 minutes and it takes 75 MINUTES to charge a Tesla at a Supercharger station. So, yeah, 2x might actually be a low number.

Any idea of the resources and industrial mobilization required to build 20K, 30K, 50K charging stations? Any idea how much CO2 this construction process would entail?

And then we have the small issue of powering them. Current Tesla Supercharger stations consume about 1.5 MWh PER DAY. This means that 20,000 stations would consume 30,000 MWh PER DAY. This assumes the same utilization level (about 50 sessions per day). Anyone visiting a gas station knows this number is laughable.

Let's put 30,000 MWh into some context: A typical nuclear power plant produces about 1,000 MW. This supercharger network would consume the output of THIRTY nuclear power plants. We would have to build one nuclear plants per year for thirty years to be ready for full scale electrification of transportation in CA. If we extend this to go nationwide we would likely end-up with, I don't know, a thousand nuclear power plants.

And don't even think about saying "solar". I don't even want to imagine the pollution China would generate if tasked with producing 30 GW in solar panels, not to mention the CO2 produced to ship and install that infrastructure...and it only covers part of the day...which means you now have to manufacture and install massive battery banks...etc.

Where is your CO2 footprint now?

This is all very simple logic and very simple math. All it requires is a bit of critical thinking applied to pencil and paper. Not that difficult. We are being sold barrels of lies right and left (I mean that politically).

People need to wake up.

Grow plants. Cut them down. Bury them in old coal mines. Repeat.

I think you can get something like 3 tons of CO2 per acre per year with switchgrass. There's around 1 trillion excess tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Let's say we use around 200 million acres of land, that works out to:

(1 trillion tons / 3 tons per acre per year) / 200 million acres = 1512 years.

But that's just the US. If other countries help with land, we could probably get 1 or 2 billion acres involved, so that drops it to 150 years.

That's a lot, but not as bad as your picture.

Do you have a study of this idea? At first glance it seems that the problems of fermentation, transportation, and resources needed to produce at that scale would be too large to overcome.

I do not. I made it up since I think it could work. Most studies assume the switchgrass will be burned in place of coal (which still helps).

Fermentation might not be a problem, I'm hoping the switchgrass would be harvested when very dry, to cut down on that. Grass for silage, (which ferments) is cut when green, but hay is dry and does not ferment.

Transportation and resources would be something, yes, but if you take a look at what we've built to make use of hydrocarbons, I think we could manage.

Process it into material that will end up in structures or even landfills also sequesters a lot.

The roots of plants to end up donating some carbon content to the soil, so it’s not just the above ground part that’s part of the equation.

This has been studied. It is likely the most promising idea. The problem is scale in terms of both plants and time. And, of course, energy.

Growing trees is precisely how the planet regulated CO2 levels over the 800,000 years of data we have. And we can see precisely how long it takes to come down by 100 ppm. The answer is 50,000 to 100,000 years.

And so the question becomes: How are we going to deliver results 1000x faster than that? On a human time scale rather than a geological scale.

We can't.

Because of the third dimension: Energy.

You can't get something for less energy than what it took to create the problem in the first place. The energy that created this problem is unimaginably large and it was deployed over a scale of millions to billions of years, consuming a staggering amount of material to store it in the form of petroleum.

We can't magically grow enough trees to "fix" it 1000x faster without energy and resources we likely do not have.

And then there's the question of what happens with so much vegetation. Which, again, is answered by the 800,000 year ice core record: Huge continental scale fires that load-up the atmosphere with CO2.

Here in California we have probably put so much CO2 in the atmosphere in the last several months that you would have to shutdown the economy for a year to compensate.

Nature is violently heartless. It does not care about us and our toys. Plant a trillion trees and see what happens when a major forest fire burns across thousands of miles without us having any ability to control it. Not a simple problem.

EDIT:

Here's a good article on the reforestation idea:

https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-clim...

Your comment is puzzling. It is true that there is nothing we can realistically do about the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. Whoever lives on this planet will have to deal with it for thousands of years. But we can do something about the CO2 that has not yet been released. The question is not to go back to pre-industrial levels, but to prevent Earth to become an unlivable hell within the next 80 years.

Not quite right. Please read the paper I linked. We can't stop CO2 accumulation by doing things like switching to electric cars everywhere and switching the entire planet to renewable energy sources.

This is a shitty conclusion but I have yet to find anyone who, after having had an honest look at the data can explain how the conclusion is wrong.

BTW, even if we go back to pre-industrial levels it will take tens of thousands of years for levels to come down.

That's the point. If it takes 100,000 years to come down by 100 ppm without humanity on earth how can it possibly take less than that with 8 billion people on the planet?

Even worse, how can the reduction in CO2 happen a thousand times faster?

How can it happen that much faster without expending so much energy and utilizing so many resources that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than to "save it"?

EDIT: With regards to what you say about not adding any more CO2 to the atmosphere. That's also a nonstarter. I understand how it might be easy to think in those terms by creating a simple mental model of reality. However, anyone who understands the industrial economy that makes it possible for nearly eight billion people to live on this planet understands that we cannot eliminate CO2 production to the extent necessary to have an impact.

Put simply, if we erased the United States from the planet on Monday, the output of countries like China and India would continue to grow CO2 at alarming rates.

Erase them from the planet. CO2 would continue to grow.

Erase all of humanity and in 100,000 years CO2 levels will have dropped by approximately 100 ppm.

And that's the problem.

What mitigation strategies are attractive to you now with your thesis?

I wish I could answer your question. I really do.

The way I would put it is this:

First we need to start by not lying. I think that almost 100% of the crap out on this subject are lies. We have religious camps that deny it all and religious camps who think we can fix it with magical pixie dust.

We need to free-up our scientists --who are genuinely scared to speak-up-- so they can start to think about reality rather than this fantasy they need to push in order to receive grants and have a job.

Next, with real conversations happening, we need to also understand that there are very compelling reasons to clean-up our act. And these reasons have nothing whatsoever to do with saving the planet, because we can't.

A simple example of this is the ridiculous fleet of container ships (some 15,000 of them on the oceans) burning the most horrific fuel available: Bunker fuel. This stuff is horrible across all axis. And nobody talks about it.

While the governor of California scores virtue-signaling points by banning IC cars by 2035 (doubt it will happen) he does and says NOTHING about bunker fuel pollution that produces, by some accounts, more contaminants in a single day than the entire transportation system of the US (cars, trucks and plans) in one year.

This is why I think the dialogue based on lies is just crazy. We are ignoring issues at scale to focus on things that are politically valuable (and likely financially too) that will deliver questionable results, if that.

So, no, I don't have an answer. I am just yelling out loud "This is wrong". Just like I was years ago about Facebook's algorithms and today there's a documentary on Netflix highlighting precisely what I predicted 8 to ten years ago. I mean, people in my own family were saying I as crazy. Now they are calling me to tell me to watch this documentary on Netflix that is saying the things I was saying years ago. Interesting how the world works.

Specifically your point about bunker fuel, this is now out of date a bit. The International Maritime Organization rules about ultra-low sulfur fuels came into effect 1/1/2020. Ironically though, this just affects sulfur, and so while a lot fewer people will die of air pollution as a result, the reduction in particulate matter (and complementary rise in greenhouse effect) is actually predicted to result in a marginal increase in global temperatures. I agree with you that much of the environmental movement in the West feels inadequate or focusing in insignificant problems (plastic straws anyone?), but from my experience in the renewable industry, people are talking about this, just too few of them.

http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-20...

Thanks for the update and link. I am glad they are cleaning-up their act.

In my research I also discovered cargo ships are responsible for other forms of pollution nobody talks about. One of them is what's called "species pollution". As they fill and empty their ballast tanks they suck in, transport and expel wild life from one location to another. In this fashion invasive species damage ecosystems not prepared to receive them.

https://www.seos-project.eu/marinepollution/marinepollution-...

That said, CO2 from container ships represents somewhere in the order of 3% of total world-wide emissions. For reference, this is greater than the CO2 output of all of Germany.

As you said, too few people are having conversations about the realities of these matters. The issue has been politicized to a ridiculous level on both sides of the spectrum and we are wasting time focusing on nonsense.

Thanks for the detailed response. Proceed along with your premise as true and go further. Assume the macro-scale organizations' incentives are broken, and will/can not take material action until near-term (organizationally fatal?) effects are threatening their hold on power. Is your worst case scenario aligned with RCP 8.5 [1] or even worse?

I do not anticipate any foreseeable feasible scenario where the economic political structure will allow scientists to lay out the facts without fearing for their livelihood to meet their basic physiological and safety needs. So turning on its head the question of how to change the economic political landscape, assume their basic needs are met, what exactly do the scientists and engineers need to gather the data and analyze it, and to what end?

I'm a little confused about the thesis chain for that matter. I see at the beginning the "we cannot save the planet" thesis, but I'm not clear on what follows other than an ambiguous "clean-up our act" thesis. Clean-up what, specifically? By what metrics?

I'm okay with accepting the premise that we will experience the worst-case scenario. I've yet to be convinced we as individuals need to wait for broader and deeper consensus to study and make large-scale decisions as a civilizational whole before taking effective action ourselves, like move towards the poles away from the equator, secure essential localized supply chains, secure potable water production, identify and practice essential skills like various disciplines of tech tree repairs, etc. I can see a need for scientists like entomologists to help identify which insect populations will shift with the bands of increased temperatures, or identify more closed-cycle and efficient permaculture without external industrial-reliant inputs. But until there is perceptible change in leadership to grasp reality, I'm not clear on the benefits of advocating for top-down change, though I certainly welcome any insight on this that I'm missing.

For me personally, the thesis that follows from "we cannot save the planet" is "decentralize and decouple myself from a happy-path-bound grid", take what accidental happenstance cooperative opportunities arise, and hope for the best on the broader economic political scale.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/the-worst-case-climat...

Regarding the first part of your comment. I can't prove what I am going to say due to reasons that will be obvious, but this is the best I can do right now.

I believe RCP 8.5 will not happen.

Why?

One more time, I go back to the 800,000 year ice core CO2 data. The earth obviously has a regulating mechanism that brought CO2 down from the 300 ppm range to 200 ppm. The way it did it is brutal and simple: Weather.

It is my hypothesis that the planet is reacting to the increase in CO2 right now by activating that mechanism. I think I can say that we are seeing more and more violent storms, hurricanes, etc. Which, in turn, precipitates more CO2 than we could ever dream of capturing through artificial means.

And so, what I am saying is that we need to start thinking about living in a world with massive powerful storms, "finger of god" class storms. The climate change problem isn't a problem for the planet, it's a problem for humanity.

> I'm a little confused about the thesis chain for that matter. I see at the beginning the "we cannot save the planet" thesis, but I'm not clear on what follows other than an ambiguous "clean-up our act" thesis. Clean-up what, specifically? By what metrics?

Me too!

Frankly, I think this is precisely the reason we need to make a push for stopping the lies and allow our brilliant scientists all over the world to focus on real solutions to real problems.

If I may offer a second hypothesis, it is that, if we stop the lies and allow them to do this work the remarkable genius of our global scientific community will reframe the problem in the proper terms and, with time, deliver relevant solutions, not to "save the planet" but rather to save humanity.